Travis Collinson’s Uneasy and Absurd Paper Portraits

San Francisco based artist Travis Collinson creates noteworthy chalk portraits that echo the famously distorted perspectives and large eyed subjects seen in Lucian Freud’s paintings made around the 1950s. The way that the artist purposefully distorts the figures and warps their detailed yet muted surroundings makes the viewer feel an ineffable sense of unease. Collinson’s use of black and white chalk on paper create a subtle tension within the each piece. He tends to work with personal family photos, reworking the familiar images multiple times, while using different mediums on different backgrounds. His otherworldly subjects seem to be portraying moments of extreme emotional impasse.